I tested out the panorama feature in the LG G3 camera last weekend while coming home from a visit to northern Iceland. I stopped by the small volcano Grábrók (“gray pants”), near Bifröst in Borgarfjörður, and climbed it. It was easier to get up there now than the last time I did it, because now there are wooden steps all the way up, and down into the crater, and a wooden walkway with viewing platforms around part of the brim of the crater. It was more fun to scramble up there through the loose lava rocks, but it was inevitable that the stairs and platform would have to be built in order to protect the fragile vegetation and the loose volcanic material on the sides of the mountain. While the pale wood stands out like a sore thumb among the dark lava, it’s better than looking at the marks made in the landscape by feet trampling on and killing plants and tamping the volcanic gravel into scars on the mountain’s side.

I found the joining of the frames to be nearly invisible, which is fantastic compared with all the panorama stitching software I have tried out over the years. However, both of the photos needed additional sharpening. I found that when I tried to sharpen the one above (after reducing its width down to a manageable size) it seemed to be made up of a grid of tiny frames with pixellated sides, and in the end I gave up trying to sharpen it. (You can see the grid if you click on the photo to enlarge it and peer at it, especially the middle section). The one below also showed signs of this when I blew it up to 100% on the screen, but the effect seemed to disappear when I reduced the size and didn’t reappear when I sharpened it.

I have also found that using the digital zoom is not a good idea when I plan to post the photos online, because the zoomed photos only really look good when viewed on the small screen of the phone. On a larger computer screen the loss of detail is obvious and they come out blurry and/or pixellated (depending on the amount of zoom used), and the colours are off. This has only been made smaller, no other work:

And here is a sharpened version with colour correction (just auto levels and sharpen because I wasn’t in the mood for doing more work):

The conical mountain is Keilir (the cone), one of the most distinctively recognisable volcanoes in the Reykjanes peninsula. The buildings belong to Bessastaðir, the official abode of the president of Iceland.